In the luxuriant garden the stump of the felled walnut-tree caught his unquiet eye. They probably used it as a picnic table now, he mused bitterly. His father had always had a gift for the melodramatic, self-pitying gesture, and to eat his lunch off a surface which packed such an emotional wallop – with, no doubt, many profound sighs between the large mouthfuls – would be right in character. Was he going to camp up his death, too, Saladin wondered. What a grandstand play for sympathy the old bastard could make now! Anyone in the vicinity of a dying man was utterly at his mercy. Punches delivered from a deathbed left bruises that never faded.
His stepmother emerged from the dying man's marbled mansion to greet Chamcha without a hint of rancour. ‘Salahuddin. Good you came. It will lift his spirit, and now it is his spirit that he must fight with, because his body is more or less kaput.’ She was perhaps six or seven years younger than Saladin's mother would have been, but out of the same birdlike mould. His large, expansive father had been remarkably consistent in these matters at least. ‘How long does he have?’ Saladin asked. Nasreen was as undeceived as her telegram had suggested. ‘It could be any day.’ The myeloma was present throughout Changez's ‘long bones’ – the cancer had brought its own vocabulary to the house; one no longer spoke of arms and legs – and in his skull. Cancerous cells had even been detected in the blood around the bones. ‘We should have spotted it,’ Nasreen said, and Saladin began to feel the old lady's power, the force of will with which she was reining in her feelings. ‘His pronounced weight-loss these past two years. Also he has complained of aches and pains, for instance in the knees. You know how it is. With an old man, you blame his age, you don't imagine that a vile, hideous disease.’ She stopped, needing to control her voice. Kasturba, the ex-ayah, had come out to join them in the garden. It turned out that her husband Vallabh had died almost a year earlier, of old age, in his sleep: a kinder death than the one now eating its way out of the body of his employer, the seducer of his wife. Kasturba was still dressing in Nasreen I's old, loud saris: today she had chosen one of the dizziest of the Op-Art black-and-white prints. She, too, greeted Saladin warmly: hugs kisses tears. ‘As for me,’ she sobbed, ‘I will never stop praying for a miracle while there is one breath left in his poor lungs.’
Nasreen II embraced Kasturba; each woman rested her head on the other's shoulder. The intimacy between the two women was spontaneous and untarnished by resentments; as if the proximity of death had washed away the quarrels and jealousies of life. The two old ladies comforted one another in the garden, each consoling the other for the imminent loss of the most precious of things: love. Or, rather: the beloved. ‘Come on,’ Nasreen finally said to Saladin. ‘He should see you, pronto.’
‘Does he know?’ Saladin asked. Nasreen answered evasively. ‘He is an intelligent man. He keeps asking, where has all the blood gone? He says, there are only two illnesses in which the blood vanishes like this. One is tuberculosis.’ But, Saladin pressed, he never actually speaks the word? Nasreen lowered her head. The word had not been spoken, either by Changez or in his presence. ‘Shouldn't he know?’ Chamcha asked. ‘Doesn't a man have the right to prepare for his death?’ He saw Nasreen's eyes blaze for an instant. Who do you think you are to tell us our duty. You have sacrificed all rights. Then they faded, and when she spoke her voice was level, unemotional, low. ‘Maybe you're correct.’ But Kasturba wailed: ‘No! How to tell him, poor man? It will break his heart.’
The cancer had thickened Changez's blood to the point at which his heart was having the greatest difficulty pumping it round his body. It had also polluted the bloodstream with alien bodies, platelets, that would attack any blood with which he was transfused, even blood of his own type. So, even in this small way, I can't help him, Saladin understood. Changez could easily die of these side-effects before the cancer did for him. If he did die from the cancer, the end would take the form either of pneumonia or of kidney failure; the doctors, knowing they could do nothing for him, had sent him home to wait for it. ‘Because myeloma is systemic, chemotherapy and radiation treatment are not used,’ Nasreen explained. ‘Only medicament is the drug Melphalan, which can in some cases prolong life, even for years. However, we are informed he is in the category which will not respond to Melphalan tablets.’ But he has not been told, Saladin's inner voices insisted. And that's wrong, wrong, wrong. ‘Still, a miracle has happened,’ Kasturba cried. ‘The doctors told that normally this is one of the most painful cancers; but your father is in no pain. If one prays, then sometimes a kindness is granted.’ It was on account of the freak absence of pain that the cancer had taken so long to diagnose; it had been spreading in Changez's body for at least two years. ‘I must see him now,’ Saladin gently asked. A bearer had taken his holdall and suit-bags indoors while they spoke; now, at last, he followed his garments indoors.
The interior of the house was unchanged – the generosity of the second Nasreen towards the memory of the first seemed boundless, at least during these days, the last on earth of their mutual spouse – except that Nasreen II had moved in her collection of stuffed birds (hoopoes and rare parrots under glass bell-jars, a full-grown King Penguin in the marble-and-mosaic hall, its beak swarming with tiny red ants) and her cases of impaled butterflies. Saladin moved past this colourful gallery of dead wings towards his father's study – Changez had insisted on vacating his bedroom and having a bed moved downstairs into that wood-panelled retreat full of rotting books, so that people didn't have to run up and down all day to look after him – and came, at last, to death's door.
Early in life Changez Chamchawala had acquired the disconcerting knack of sleeping with his eyes wide open, ‘staying on guard', as he liked to say. Now, as Saladin quietly entered the room, the effect of those open grey eyes staring blindly at the ceiling was positively unnerving. For a moment Saladin thought he was too late; that Changez had died while he'd been chatting in the garden. Then the man on the bed emitted a series of small coughs, turned his head, and extended an uncertain arm. Saladin Chamcha went towards his father and bowed his head beneath the old man's caressing palm.
To fall in love with one's father after the long angry decades was a serene and beautiful feeling; a renewing, life-giving thing, Saladin wanted to say, but did not, because it sounded vampirish; as if by sucking this new life out of his father he was making room, in Changez's body, for death. Although he kept it quiet, however, Saladin felt hourly closer to many old, rejected selves, many alternative Saladins – or rather Salahuddins – which had split off from himself as he made his various life choices, but which had apparently continued to exist, perhaps in the parallel universes of quantum theory. Cancer had stripped Changez Chamchawala literally to the bone; his cheeks had collapsed into the hollows of the skull, and he had to place a foam-rubber pillow under his buttocks because of the atrophying of his flesh. But it had also stripped him of his faults, of all that had been domineering, tyrannical and cruel in him, so that the mischievous, loving and brilliant man beneath lay exposed, once again, for all to see. If only he could have been this person all his life, Saladin (who had begun to find the sound of his full, un-Englished name pleasing for the first time in twenty years) found himself wishing. How hard it was to find one's father just when one had no choice but to say goodbye.